After years of reddit/twitter/facebook propping up fascism/bigotry with algorithms & bots I’m honestly surprised and relieved to be in an online space that clearly rejects their ideology.
They can have reddit/facebook/twitter. AFAIC the only way to reach some of these people is to leave them alone long enough to realize on their own.
Lemmy.world admins are doing an amazing job dealing with everything. Their recent decision to defederate from exploding heads (or whatever its called) really goes to show that they’re in it for the right reasons.
How’s that Nazi bar story go again?
I was at a shitty crust punk bar once getting an afterwork beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “No. Get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “Hey, I’m not doing anything. I’m a paying customer,” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “Out. Now,” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed.
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “You didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And I was like, “Oh okay,” and he continues.
"You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends, and the friends bring friends, and they stop being cool and then you realize, ‘Oh shit. This is a nazi bar now.’ And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down."
And I was like, “Oh damn,” and he said, “Yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
-iamragesparkle
fuck thats so good so perfectly understandable. When we think about genius we tend to think about mathematicians and physicist working on problems no one else understands. The real genius’s out there though in my opinion are people who understand something so well and so fully they can break down a concept like this. A story anyone can understand.
Absolutely. I’ve heard if you can’t explain something in a way that a beginner would understand, you don’t know it as well as you think you do. That’s real mastery.
brilliant.
So, did nazi that coming.
I was so fucking relieved to see that lemmy.world doesn’t fuck around with the fascist “absolute free-speech” game. Fucking FINALLY! If I didn’t already have a reason not to return to reddit/Twitter/whatever, this would’ve been enough on its own. Thank you, admins!
Agreed.
There’s no good reason to platform people who proudly espouse terrorist ideologies, and fascism is 100% a terrorist ideology.
Well, we learned the lesson from Voat. “Absolute free speech” just doesn’t work.
While I certainly understand the appeal of “free speech no compromises” the evidence is real clear that any online forum that adopts that mentality invariably becomes a bigoted shitpile, I’m not going to make a choice on philosophical grounds when the reality of the situation makes itself so obvious
Is it a coincidence that every single place that claims to be “free speech - no exceptions!!1!” is an absolute trash fire inside of a rat hole? NOPE. That’s the Paradox of Tolerance proving itself true.
We need to heed the warnings, and I’m glad the Fediverse exists to do so.
Relevant xkcd for the occasion: https://m.xkcd.com/1357/
Those “free speech” places just end up degenerating into a cesspool where people who were banned elsewhere end up congregating.
This is the LITERAL first post I saw after signing up. I’m ecstatic and so fucking relieved
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Most content there was violating the lemmy.world rules - which can be found here https://mastodon.world/about.
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That’s something I noticed when I joined Mastodon as well. When people are in control for the sake of community and not profit, things tend to be better in this regard. Let crazies federate with crazies.
NGL I derive some joy seeing maga/conservative/fascist communities getting all their misinformation downvoted to hell while the only positively voted posts are about the crimes & failures of trump and republicans in general.
I don’t want them banned. This is much better.
They don’t learn though. While you may derive pleasure from their ignorance, there are some who may get sucked into their worldview who may not otherwise be. Free speech doesn’t require a community to put up with their nonsense.
I don’t derive pleasure from their ignorance. From that I derive migraines. It’s specifically their failure to gain traction here on lemmy that I must admit to a degree of schadenfreude.
But for real, I’ve lost dear friends to this movement. At this point I’ve simply recognized that the only way to save those people is to be patient and keep an open door in case they do realize they’re being duped. It’s that or drive them further into the cult.
Thankfully lemmy is not putting up with their nonsense. I don’t actually care if they get banned or not. I can only hope that seeing that their rhetoric only trends in spaces known to be bot-ridden and algo-driven will cause the most rational of them to wake up.
Hear hear.
What does free speech have to do with it? Free speech right guarantees that you won’t be prosecuted by the government for your words. It doesn’t apply to private communications.
Free speech as a law, maybe, but many people like myself view it as an ideal.
That’s not an ideal, that’s lunacy.
Fuck censorship.
I love how taking out the Trump trash happens so much faster here!
Over in the old place, getting the admins to do something about right-wing toxicity was like pulling teeth. Flagrant TOS-violating bigotry, hate & disinfo would fester for weeks, months, years while the admins yawned
At the same time, if people started talking about punching Nazis, the bans and post deletions would start flying instantly, with admins threatening mods & threatening to ban entire subs if they didn’t delete Nazi-punching posts fast enough.
Gee, you think those admins were biased?
with admins threatening mods & threatening to ban entire subs if they didn’t delete Nazi-punching posts fast enough.
Oh hey there, beholdthemasterrace subscriber! That poor mod.
Hey!!!
Is beholdthemasterrace migrating to Fediverse land? I’d love to find them over here!
I’m not sure. I stopped following it awhile ago, over half of the comments in some of the posts were brigaders.
Wait why are you glorifying banning “trump trash”, free speech should definitely not include banning someone for their political opinions. I am voting trump next election hands down.
You don’t get to agree to disagree when your political agenda involves shitting on people’s rights.
This comment is not very self aware. Sad to see so many of the far left have already migrated from reddit, let me guess, you were subbed to r/politics?
The man was selling classified information, it’s not a far left to view his supporters as trash, it’s patriotic.
The issue with supporting Trump is all the dog whistling he does. People in the know understand that he wants to suppress “the bad people’s” rights. People against that know the tolerance paradox and shut down Trumpism immediately.
People who don’t know the dog whistling wonder why everyone is so upset and continue supporting him.
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Loved the comment from user @TheLurker@lemmy.world :
*"If you want your own unfiltered feed. Create your own instance and don’t de-federated any other instance. All the content in the feed will be available because like email, it is federated, so you only need to subscribe to the feeds. The admins do not control the content. But they do control the instances which they maintain, and rightly so.
This is NOT A PLATFORM, it is a protocol and you have the choice to engage with it how you want. Don’t like an instance, stop using it. Use another or create your own. You will still get all the content."*
This is just so well stated, imho. Of course the person TheLurker was speaking to isn’t interested in the content, they’re interested in the users so that they can troll them endlessly.
The lack of corporate influence is really felt here. Corpos love right-wing fanatics because they make people mad, which encourages engagement with a platform.
I’ve really found myself not emotionally engaged when on the fediverse and that’s great.
It truly has been such a pleasant experience. I have commented more since the 12th here than I have in a year from the other place.
I signed up for Voat years ago when it was online, but the rampant anti-semitism rendered the site unusable.
I gave it a try when I was going through my “absolute free speech” phase. I thought it was alright for a couple weeks, but after the people from “/r/coontown” came, i started to question my beliefs. Place immediately went to shit.
I wasn’t fed up with reddit enough back then to stick with voat. IIRC it literally was a reddit clone just with 1% of the content.
…and more nazi
Explains a lot. I never saw the appeal but I am not a racist.
There were a few subreddits that got the axe along with some of the nsfw and hatemob stuff that were neither. Man it was awkward watching Voat rapidly spiral with that massive imbalance. Lemmy seems cool so far, and even if it doesn’t end up top of the list, at least viable alternatives/competition is starting to gain ground on reddit.
Voat got so bad they bullied The_Donald users off the site for not being shitty enough. I almost respect them for that, but yeah, still super shitty.
We aren’t quite out of the woods yet.
/c/ConservativesOnly /c/Maga/c/conservative and/c/prolifeare still around here on lemmyworld and spreading bullshit.Edit: some were removed after all
Every one of those but /c/conservative are deleted.
Look the mod/admin tools are limited and we do or best to take care of these things asap but we also don’t want to go nuclear on something without checking it out. /c/conservativesonly and /c/maga had their mods removed a while ago and were up for grabs. that’s why we added the LW_NewModWanted to those communities and asked for new mods. Surprisingly nobody here was interested so now we deleted them completely. They can be recreated on other instances.
Didn’t know about that /c/prolife one until now though. But it’s gone
First, thank you.
Second, you guys are ON TOP OF IT!!! Excellent work, you guys are amazing!
Third,
Surprisingly nobody here was interested so now we deleted them completely
HAHHAHAHAH so you saw my comment???
“FYI nobody is interested go back to reddit”
Excellent work. Thank you!
c/ConservativesOnly and c/Maga were removed due to lack of moderation and because the previous moderator(s) were banned.
Holy shit… either that was in the last 10 hours or my lemmy was lagging.
Props to the admins/mods!
NGL part of me wanted the banned mod (OptionHome I think) to stay and be our community laughing stock.
True but have you looked at the vote scores in those communities?
On reddit they were cesspools but on lemmy they’re laughing stocks. The only posts they can get above zero are antithetical ones pointing out the criminality and incompetence of trump/republicans.
If the internet existed in Germany in the 1930’s, I wouldn’t take much solace in the fact that the fascists are getting downvoted. They’re getting into power and every day they spread more and more dehuminization and hate.
On reddit they became cesspools because the admins refused to do anything about their fascism, so I don’t have a lot of trust for the admins of lemmy.
Would you be happier if it was only upvotes? I don’t follow your logic at all.
I just don’t want fascism to be allowed on this instance to begin with.
I get the inclination to want admins to ban them… but not only is that unnecessary (at this point in time!) it’s also a far, far weaker rebuke than the entire community refusing to let them trend.
We saw how on reddit, banning subs simply resulted in them making new ones.
At least on lemmy there is visible evidence that no matter what they call their community it will be rejected by the lemmy community as a whole.
At least here’s hoping!
Agreed. I have faith that a level headed discussion is usually enough to overcome most hatred
If you see anything that violates the lemmy.world rules please report it. Those rules can be found here https://mastodon.world/about
Thanks!
Fascism = political viewpoint that I disagree with
No, fascism is from the side that pushes their Christian agenda onto people. Decides how they should live their life if they are born with the wrong plumbing, decides if a women should complete her pregnancy even at the risk of her own life and decides what books are allowed at school.
Never said that
I checked those out out of morbid curiosity and saw them mostly being trolled by lefties/libs. Warmed my heart.
I’d like to believe that such communities could be allowed to exist as long as they weren’t allowed to become “safe spaces” for misinformation the way the ones on Reddit were (i.e. if everybody defederated with any ones that did). Allowing those sorts of people to post but denying them the ability to stop others from debunking their claims could be more effective than shoving them off into dark corners where they can radicalize themselves undisturbed.
I’m not sure whether I do believe that, but I’d like to.
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Genuine question: are you just trying to censor any viewpoint that you disagree with? Because it sure as shit seems like you guys are trying to make this into another left-wing circlejerk where anything even remotely right wing is immediately removed regardless of how level-headed or civil it’s presented.
are you just trying to censor any viewpoint that you disagree with?
Nope. I just don’t like fascists/bigots.
Oh go back to your own circlejerks. You’ve got plenty. Truth Social, 4chan, Twitter…
You do not belong here.
You do not belong here
My crime? Having a different opinion. You sound awfully fascist to me.
Your different opinion is that those who think LGBT people should die should be allowed to spread that opinion
You are wrong, deal
Except nobody said that, lmfao. Nice try though.
Most people don’t have an issue with old conservatism, as it still had the goal of making the country better.
Modern conservatism is more focused on contrarianism and depriving various groups of their rights or quality of life. Given the tolerance paradox, people outside of this mindset don’t want to allow discussion in that area to spread.
Due to this shift in conservatism, communities that, on their face, seem like communities with just a different political leaning have had to tolerate this bigotry.
I somewhat agree. Though it’s hard to distinguish humour from truth these days.
There hasn’t been a shift in conservatism. There has, however, been a shift in the left’s labeling of it.
Right: “don’t chop off the penis of children”
Left’s response: “OMG you’re literally commuting genocide to trans people!!!”
Yeah, no. Not buying it. And banning anything you disagree with in the guise of “anti-fascism” is just the Orwellian icing on the cake.
Aaaand you are fucking lying.
Yeah tbh trans discussion isn’t even my space so I’m not even going to get involved. I just don’t want to have an opinion of others lives or belief systems in this case.
Personally, my only gripe really is that I feel that male bisexuality should be more accepted. Not directed at anyone in particular.
That’s it really.
Cool. Glad you have an opinion. Isn’t it great that you’re allowed to express it civilly without a horde of intolerant losers trying to censor you for it?
Just by saying that the left “wants to chop of children’s penis” you are spreading misinformation.
No, the take is this: if someone feels like they are born in the wrong body shouldn’t they be free to do whatever makes them feel better? Should they not be provided with all the mental and physical help to make a decision whatever that would be?
Ps not everyone is American and those US takes which are “slightly to the right” for you are Hella-right to a lot of us.
Right: “don’t chop off the penis of children”
What about hermaphrodites where ambiguous genitalia could be damaging to their long-term health?
IIRC, removal of the inappropriate penis (external genitalia) is the preferred choice in today’s medial science for fixing 46 XX DSD. Which is a pretty simple case of internal-organs are female, the child identifies as a female, but for various mutation/birth defect reasons, she was born with a penis (Completely non-functioning mind you, as all the internal parts are female).
where anything even remotely right wing is immediately removed regardless of how level-headed or civil it’s presented.
There is nothing civil about taking people’s rights away, dehumanizing people, and destroying our biosphere. Fascism is inherently uncivil regardless of presentation.
I have seen more people with different ideologies beliefs and opinions have actual discussions and civil debates here since I joined then I have anywhere in a long time. I feel safe to comment and share my opinions because even if someone were to disagree and share a different opinion, I know I am not going to get a barrage of mean and hateful replies and messages.
Prior to 2015, I had friends from many walks of life. Sometimes we’d have some heated discussions, but no one was yelling, being racist, spewing hate etc.
Since 2016, most of my conservative friends actively eliminated everybody who did not think like them. It was mind-boggling how many people I knew asked who I voted for and if it wasn’t for Trump they let me know I was no longer welcome to be their friend. I didn’t even vote for Hillary and yet it was extremely difficult to even convince them of that. They forgot that there were other people running in the race apparently.
I think if you stick around long enough you will see many viewpoints and discussions here.
Glad to see this as my first post away from Reddit. With spez and his pedo/incel/pro-slavery crap.
LOL, the OOP’s username in that linked thread is certainly a username.
Really appreciate all the human eyes keeping a lookout for this nonsense instead of letting the ragebait spiral in on itself with the algorithms.
The mod comment is glorious in the replies:
If it truly gets under your skin that these bigoted spaces are being defederated by the nicer spaces, feel free to join a more right-wing infested instance. Just understand that the rest of the fediverse is not obliged to listen to their lunacy.
Fuckin’ mike drop.
It’s a pretty good take, but also the defederation ban-hammer seems to get dropped a bit, which seems like it should be the last option, not the first.
Surely there should be a way to mark content coming in from questionable servers with a tag so that users can choose to see it on their instance, similar to how NSFW posts can be hidden.
At least that way the content would be federated and things synced, leaving the choice up to the user.
Why give the option to indulge in that shit? They can fuck right off and live in their dumb little world with each other.
I think the thing you’re forgetting is that users have the autonomy to find an instance (or create their own) that doesn’t filter that stuff out.
It also seems to me that instances do a good job of describing themselves and it should be pretty easy to get an idea of what they will/won’t allow.
Just in case users really wanted to see some hate speech mixed in with their regular discussions?
Go ahead and build the feature.
Until it exists, this is the current solution.
That’s the main issue. Corporate social media place “engagement” above everything. This means amplifying hate and bigotry. Once you stop amplifying this shit, it becomes far less prominent and people aren’t caught in a bubble any more.
I blame bots and newsfeed propaganda. Its gotten worse since Trump
What bothers me is that the free speech absolutists demand free speech for themselves, while offering none to anyone else. They have absolutely no problems with “echo chambers” which only echo and reinforce their beliefs… just look at any of the right-wing alternatives to Twitter, like Truth Social. It’s literally in the terms of service that you can’t challenge or criticize almighty Trump.
Right-wingers have PLENTY of spaces to make their idiotic opinions known… they’re not starved for outlets of expression. So why come here? Sorry, but you’ve already got Germany. You’re not annexing Czechoslovakia and Poland. Can’t has, not yours.
What bothers me is that the free speech absolutists demand free speech for themselves, while offering none to anyone else.
This Sartre quote keeps getting posted, but I’ll post it again because it’s still true:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”
It’s an old quote, because the far right haven’t fundamentally changed much in a century. It’s the same old shit.
You can tell a pigeon that it is wrong, that you are right, you can support your arguments with reputable studies, solid arguments, and respected expert opinion. You will still end up with shit in your hair.
“Don’t wrestle with pigs. You just end up covered in shit and the pig enjoys it.”
They want to bully people. They’re only able to feel better about themselves by making themselves feel superior. This is why when they rely on culture wars because as soon as they don’t have an enemy to hold their attention they all turn on each other out of necessity.
The biggest difference I’ve experienced between the fediverse and Reddit is how infrequently I come across outright bigotry in the comments. I didn’t expect that, and I certainly didn’t expect that to feel as refreshing as it did. I had gotten to the point where I was just numb to the racism, misogyny, homo/transphobia, etc. Not having to put up with it to nearly the same degree in my first few weeks over here was amazing.
Now that I’ve (a) seen that a community can exist with a minimum of people calling me slurs, and (b) realized how much those comments were actually affecting me (I’m not so tough after all), I am very aggressive about protecting this space while it’s still possible to stem the tide.
I suspect a lot of other Reddit migrants feel something similar. We’ve been forced to put up with these chuds for years, to the point where we’ve just started treating them as an inevitable, natural forces, like shitty weather or beach seagulls. Over the last four years, particularly, we’ve very clearly seen the result of allowing these fuckfaces to take root and grow their communities. Now that we have a chance to make something different, a place where that doesn’t happen, we’re (pretty collectively) jumping at the chance to actually fight against them. Trying to fight them on Reddit was like trying to fight a snowstorm, or fire ants, or the just the fucking tide. Here? There’s a chance.
The unilateral rejection of right wing antics gives me hope for humanity. Not just that lemmy admins are willing to take a stand… but that the entire community here is downvoting them and not letting them thrive anywhere.
When I joined a week ago, the founder of c/conservative had already been run out of his own community and created c/conservativesonly… which he was subsequently run out of a second time and forced to make a new account to mod it.
In a weird way… lemmy might be the proof of concept we needed that democracy can beat fascism.
Well said
To be fair I prefer not to conflate any and all fascism or conservatism with either of the other.
At the end of the day, everybody deserves space and a voice, whether they call themselves left or right wingers, what’s important is whether they want that space to become a hate filled echo chamber is on them.
Well, I have good news and I have bad news.
Bad news first - I think a lot of the reason this doesn’t exist on federated services is largely because those services are in their infancy and principled people or at least people with slightly more than lukewarm IQs are more likely to seek them out.
Good news - the capitalist nature of corporate social media means that at scale you have to tolerate a certain number of nazis and bigots. See also: the recall scene from Fight Club. The fediverse largely doesn’t have that problem. We don’t have to say “we have to keep this account on the network because they’re boosting the ad numbers” we can just fucking ban them.
In the short term for the fediverse, it’s a little security by obscurity. In the longer term, it’s really more of a moderation problem, but even there I’m optimistic. Over on reddit, there were/are a few subs where if you blocked every user subscribed, you’d lose no value even in other subs. instances are going to be similar, I bet.
